An unassuming man, Richard Jarrow was sure that the government knew best, with its control of industry, education, and the media, and that other countries were much less free. And then his world went mad. . . .
The Multiplex Man
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle.
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
In this unfocused SF thriller set in the near future, the bureaucracy governing America and Western Europe has used environmental protection as an excuse to wrest away personal liberty, while the military conducts secret experiments in transferring personality from one brain to another as the ultimate form of mind control. Conservative schoolteacher Richard Jarrow awakens one day in an Atlanta hotel room with a new body and a six-month gap in his memory. His original corpus, he learns, died six months ago, and he shares the new body with several other personalities, among them a deadly super-spy code-named Samurai. The spy has been assigned to track down scientist Conrad Ashling, who pioneered the brain-transfer technology. Now disillusioned, Ashling is seeking to defect to the open society of Eastern Europe and the offworld colonies. The ensuing chase across the globe and into space is marred by weak characterizations and the protagonist's frequent changes of identity, which lead to a troublesome lack of continuity. Readers are unlikely to believe in the world Hogan ( Entroverse ) creates or to care much about its inhabitants.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An intellectual roller-coaster ride,
By
This review is from: The Multiplex Man (Mass Market Paperback)
What if you weren't . . . you?
(What if you were a writer _telling the story_ of someone in that situation? How would you organize it?) If you're the protagonist in this fascinating SF novel, you're probably in for some interesting experiences. But will you get to keep them? (If you're James P. Hogan, you tell the story in chunks, cycling through the various nonoverlapping personalities and telling the parts of the tale for which each is "present," as it were.) Who do you turn out to be? Are you one person or several? Which hero saves the day, and which hero _gets_ saved? Are they the same person? Are you sure? Hogan is in fine narrative form here. I've seen his writing described as "textbook-dry," but that's not likely to dissuade those of us who regard, say, Kernighan and Ritchie's _The C Programming Language_ as the pinnacle of expository prose style. Hogan writes like a _good_ engineer; his prose does the job he wants it to do, and the meat is in the story. (You don't need mannered digressions about the splendid colors of the autumn leaves in a book whose theme is that the universe isn't what you think it is.) In fact this is a fun book, full of Hogan's trademark mind-blowing coolness. The underlying technology is rendered plausible and the story is interesting from beginning to end. Even if you know what must be going on -- and you will, by midway through the second chapter, even if you hadn't figured it out from the title -- you'll still be kept guessing until the very end about (a) how and why it happened, and (b) how it will ultimately turn out. Hogan is one of my two favorite living SF writers (the other is Spider Robinson, who doesn't write "hard" SF). If you like SF, you'll like him.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
P.K. Dick, eat your heart out,
By Genzo (Philadelphia, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Multiplex Man (Mass Market Paperback)
I completely enjoyed this book. Its a story like Total Recall
with strange twists of personality exchange, but gripping from start to finish. Its also an interesting future, where the US is a totalitarian state and eastern europe a libertarian utopia (hence the Prometheus award the book won, which honors best libertarian fantasy). The political elements are believable and don't hit you over the head. The plot does.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Multiplex Man is outstanding,
By
This review is from: Multiplex Man, The (Hardcover)
As most of the other reviews have noted, James P. Hogan here presents a somewhat unevenly written story. However, that being said, there is a class of reader (such as I) that really appreciates clever sf and surprising plot twists.Multiplex Man does have its moments of annoying polemics so frequent in Hogan's work. However, the incredible entertainment of this book easily makes reading it well worth while. Towards the end I couldn't put it down; the adventure was so exciting, the explanations so satisfying. If you have difficulty finding this out-of-print book, a little Web searching can reward you with this gem.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Inside This Book
(learn more)
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Browse and search another edition of this book.
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
